*These games were a split-national broadcast; the ratings are for the two games combined.All numbers are BBM Canada AMA 2+

Based on this, it looks like CBC made the right decision to take the Montreal-Ottawa series instead of the Canucks. Not only is it getting better ratings, but even CBC’s third choice (STL-LA) put up comparable numbers for game 3. Its never good when a series trends downward on the weekend, as happened with the Canucks last night. To compare, last year the Canucks had a million more viewers for game 3 (on a Wednesday night) on CBC. In fact the Canucks’ ratings for games 1-3 were quite comparable to Habs-Sens this year. I know there is a difference between TSN and CBC, but come on, it isn’t worth 50% reduction in audience levels. The first three games from Flyers-Penguins on TSN last spring all had better ratings than the first three from Sharks-Canucks this year.

For comparison, here are the ratings for the first few days of the playoffs last year.

The one thing to note is Sunday’s ratings. Lots of things on and competing for eyeballs. None of them really did anything spectacular. The Brier was down under a million for the first time in a while, and it only got about a quarter of its viewers from the lucrative 25-54 age group. Hockey on RDS was relatively consistent, finishing second. One of the biggest games in Canadian baseball history only drew 70, 000 more viewers than a Jays spring training game a few weeks ago.

March has began, and with it have came programming plans for many of the big events this month. Here is a quick roundup of what’s happened in sports media this week.

The World Baseball Classic begins later tonight in Taichung and Fukouka. Sportsnet will broadcast all 39 games, beginning with Australia vs. Taiwan tonight at 11:30pm ET. 25 games will air exclusively on Sportsnet ONE. Canada’s three games will air on all four regional channels. The other 10 games will air on a mix of the two, due to scheduling conflicts with regional hockey. I may be wrong on this, but as I understand there is only one broadcast feed for the World Baseball Classic. MLB Network will produce games in the United States. MLB International will everywhere else. That means we will get two Americans calling the Canada-US game. For the first round Rich Waltz and Buck Martinez will call Group A games in Fukouka, JB Long and Joe Magrane will call Group B games in Taichung, and Gary Thorne and Jose Mota (my favourite team) will call Group C in San Juan. Matt Yallof and Jeff Nelson, and Matt Vasgersian and Jim Kaat will split Group D games in Arizona. Bob Costas will come in to call the final. Sportsnet will show all games in their entirety, except for two that are joined in progress this weekend. That’s better than in 2009 when the start of almost every game was cut off by Connected.

The 2013 Tim Hortons Brier begins tomorrow afternoon in Edmonton. TSN has more than 65 hours of live coverage of the most prestigous curling event in the world. Favourites include defending champ Glenn Howard, Jeff Stoughton, Kevin Martin, Brad Gushue and Brad Jacobs. Also take this as a sign of things to come, graphics-wise.

Sportsnet will broadcast the CIS Men’s Hockey Championship for a sixth straight year. The regional channels will show the final two pool play games on March 16, with the final on Sportsnet ONE on March 17. Alberta and Saskatchewan from Canada West, as well as UNB and St. Mary’s from the AUS have already qualified. The OUA also has two spots.

Sportsnet has officially announced their 2013 IndyCar Series coverage, as they enter their first year as the Canadian broadcaster. Sportsnet will show every race live, which I don’t think TSN ever did in all of their years covering the series. Sportsnet will have six races, including the two races in Toronto and the Indianapolis 500; Sportsnet ONE has nine; and Citytv has the two races in Detroit. Sportsnet will even have a studio crew anchored by Rob Faulds with analysts Paul Tracy and Bill Adam for four of the races. Todd Lewis will work as a pit reporter for those four races.

For those wondering about the Jays games airing on FX, there is a reason for why those broadcasts are airing there. The decision to show them came well too late to make them Sportsnet productions. Plans are often made months in advance for any sports production. Rogers doesn’t want to show Jays games on Sportsnet that use the other teams’ feed, so they are marketing them as bonus games on FX. Of course it also can’t hurt as a promo tool for FX either.

Lastly, how about ratings this week? Sportsnet set a record for a Jays spring training game, while TSN had its highest NHL audience since the first game after the lockout in 2005.

For the second time in two games CTV cut off an NFL postgame show just as former CFLer, and inspiration to the Ravens, O.J. Brigance appeared on the broadcast. It’s bad enough that CTV cut out on a guy who has ALS and is clearly one of the great stories of the Ravens’ Super Bowl run, but to make it worse they also missed the Lomardi Trophy presentation. That’s right. The trophy presentation of the most watched sports event in Canada was not on Canadian television. Instead for the second time in as many weeks CTV cut away from a trophy presentation to show regular primetime programming. And it neither case it was simulcast programming. There was really no rush for CTV to get to Anger Management or Motive.

Some will blame the CRTC for this, and honestly I don’t really want to start another simsub debate because they never go anywhere. So let’s take simsubbing completely out of this for a second because it really had no effect on CTV’s decision. Sure it resulted in some people missing the postgame show on CBS as well, but that wouldn’t be a problem if CTV had just stuck with the postgame show until the next commercial break. What happened is unacceptable for an official NFL broadcaster who spent 12 hours showing football programming on Sunday. Surely another five minutes wouldn’t have killed Motive’s ratings. I know the blackout messed everyone up (and almost certainly resulted in lower ratings for Motive and Elementary), but it’s not an excuse.

Ratings… The ratings for the Super Bowl show a continuing downward trend for NFL playoff ratings this year. An average of 6.447 million Canadian tuned in on CTV. For what its worth CTV’s press release said 6.6 million, that’s the number not including the power outage. An average of 763, 000 watched on RDS (also not including the power outage, presumably). An average of 5.5 million watched the Grey Cup on TSN last November. That was the most watched Grey Cup ever on English-language TV. The Super Bowl was well off CTV’s ratings for last year (7.3 million), but still more or less on par with 2011 (6.54 million). And, of course, perspective is important. Other than the Super Bowl, the Oscars was the only broadcast to hit 6.5 million in 2012.

In the post-Super Bowl battle, Motive averaged 1.229 million on CTV and Elementary averaged 548, 000 on Global. The delay likely affected both. That’s about a million lower than Elementary usually gets on Thursdays. I know Global missed the simulcast on Shaw Direct. Did this happen on other providers too, maybe?

Power Outage… The Superdome going dark was perhaps one of the strangest things ever to happen in a Super Bowl. And if the halftime didn’t kill all the momentum of the game, having another thirty minute delay certainly did. Of course the 49ers did bring excitement back into the game by closing the gap when the lights came back on, but the thirty minutes of unprepared mindless talk from CBS’s analysts was hard to get through. On the field Steve Tasker, usually an analyst thrown into Super Bowl sideline duty for CBS, was excellent considering the position he was in. He was the first back on air to inform viewers about what happened. He had real information while the studio painfully tried to fill time as “15 more minutes” became “15 more minutes”. I blame Craig Ferguson for the blackout.

Nantz and Simms… It’s actually pretty rare for a play-by-play to outperform an analyst, but I think it happened last night. Jim Nantz was the first to suggest that the Ravens take a safety because it could almost entirely run out the clock (I’ll proudly say I thought of it before Nantz said it). Simms disagreed. Apparently the 49ers were as shocked as Phil because the Ravens ran 8 seconds off the clock by running around in the endzone. The 49ers didn’t have enough time to run another offensive play after the safety.

But I think I need to rewind, because that wasn’t Simms only error. All he could offer up after the Ravens fake field goal was, “I’m not going to second guess the call.” What a second? Isn’t that his job? The Ravens had am opportunity to go up three touchdowns and turned it down to let the kicker try to pick up nine yards; isn’t that a call that Simms should second guess? If the Ravens had lost by less than 3 points John Harbaugh probably would have second guessed it.

Later he offered up this gem, “Even if Kaepernick couldn’t run the football, he’d still be a top-five quarterback.” Now one could argue Kaepernick isn’t even a top-five quarterback when including his running ability (has Simms ever heard of Brady, the brothers Manning, Rodgers, Brees and y’know, that QB on the other sideline). I think its fair to say that based on his throwing ability alone, he probably isn’t even a top-ten QB in the NFL. Bill Cowher probably agrees. During the power outage he suggested putting Alex Smith in, which maybe was the only thing more confusing than Simms’ analysis.

But back to the final minutes. Maybe Simms was so terrible on the safety play because he was still reeling from the 49ers final offensive play minutes earlier. So was it holding or was it not, that was the question. And a really good one it was for Simms. At first he said it wasn’t, which is quite fine (I didn’t think it was either). But after seeing a few replays, he began to change his mind and offered, “The more angles I see, the more confused I get.” If anything the it is Simms job to clarify the viewers’ confusion? Simms should have offered a definitive opinion one way or the other. Or CBS should have had a rules expert to weigh in, as ESPN and FOX do.

My personal favourite Simms quote though, “I’ve heard it a thousand times this week, when the Ravens get inside the 20, they are going to try and score.” Well apparently it wasn’t true on the fake field goal (unless they preferred touchdowns). Three things I don’t particularly like. A commentator grossly overstating something for no reason. There’s no way he heard it a thousand times. And stating the obvious. And “try and score”. Unless they’re playing rugby and football, or something, that makes no sense. Maybe they were going to try to score.

I don’t mean to be overly harsh on Simms because he usually isn’t a terrible analyst. However, when I notice how bad someone was during the Super Bowl, when I’m so preoccupied with the game, the ads and the food, it means they were bad. I rarely bother writing about the broadcast because I rarely notice these things during the Super Bowl. I did this year. Partially because of the blackout and partly because of horrible Simms was.

The World Series averaged 775, 000 viewers over four games on Sportsnet. That is slightly up from the 7 game series betwen Texan and St. Louis last season ;however, the first four games only averaged 567, 000 viewers. The hockey lockout obviously helps a bit, but it I think it is fair to say the popularity of baseball is slightly on the rise in Canada as well. This was the lowest rated World Series in history on FOX in America.

The Pacers-Raptors game on Wednesday night was the highest rated Raptors game since the 2009-10 season. It was lower than most NBA Finals games from June, but higher than just about every other basketball game from last season. Yet again, a product of the NHL lockout. Usually TSN’s Wednesday Night Hockey is king on Wednesdays, while hoops is shuffled to TSN2. Basketball took centre-stage on Wednesday, and with no competition, brought in as many viewers as some nationally broadcast NHL games do. Now, can the Raps keep it up?

Skate Canada Saturday night ratings were actually slightly down from a year ago, when CTV’s coverage when head-to-head with a Leafs-Penguins game that averaged over 2 million viewers.

The three main NFL games (Sunday 4pm, Sunday 8pm, Monday) were down slightly from last week. The World Series (Sunday) and Hurricane Sandy (Monday) probably played a role in this.

The CFL averaged 736, 000 viewers this week, buyoyed by over a million for the playoff bound Riders and Argonauts. I credited the lack of sucess of these two teams as a major factor in the drop in CFL ratings last year. Seems like their good seasons will help raise CFL ratings this year. As a whole, the ratings are slightly down over week 17 though.

Here are the latest ratings as the CFL and Baseball postseason continue to benefit from the lack of hockey. And hockey from 20 years ago benefits from no hockey this year. Thanks to Whitey Fisk and Bill Brioux for publicizing many of these.

First off, anyone who says the NFL is way more popular than the CFL needs to look at these numbers. Yes, many watch the NFL on Sunday afternoon on American nets or Sunday Ticket, but the three big nationally televised games were all well below the CFL standard.

I’m not sure of the exact percentage change, but Sportsnet’s LCS ratings were up over last year. Games 1 and 3 of the Yankees series was far and away better than thar 528, 000 high mark from last season. Giants-Cardinals averaged 477, 000 viewers for the six games that weren’t affected by rain.

In a rare occurance, a baseball game beat CFL Friday Night Football this past weekend; however, the 110-yard game stormed back to take the highest sports rating of the weekend. Thanks to Whitey Fisk and Bill Brioux for publicizing many of these.

So, as you can see, baseball won head-to-head on Friday, but football (CFL and NFL) won head-to-head on Saturday and Sunday.

Not really any big surprises, but I did think STL-SF would slightly edge out GB-HOU on Sunday night. The difference was only a few percentage points and considering viewers could have watched FOX and NBC (respectively), the margin of error is probably close enough that neither truly won. Regardless, TSN’s football beat Sportsnet’s baseball two out of three nights.

The small percentage difference between the NLCS and Sunday Night Football is a completely different story than in America where the Packers-Texans game on NBC had almost triple the number of viewers as baseball on FOX.

Also of note, Felix Baumgartner’s thrilling jump to earth from over 125, 000 feet in the air attracted an averaged audience of 435, 000 on Sportsnet Sunday morning over 3 hours. That’s impressive considering the first two and a half hours were spent watching him slowly go up into the atmosphere. The audience peaked at 1.25 million as he was falling. Nearly 1.9 million viewers watched at least some of the broadcast, which shows there were a few who got bored with the long wait and gave never came back.